Shrewsbury officials target illegal water connections

The Board of Water Commissioners is hoping to save the town at least $160,000 a year with a policy for removing illegal private water flow into town sewers.

Typical illicit sewer connections include basement sump pumps, roof leaders, driveway drains and foundation/cellar French drains that send water into the sewer lines. For example, a homeowner might have a sump pump drain into a basement sink. If instead the water were sent outside into the ground, there would be no problem.

During heavy rains or snow melts, illicit devices send clean storm water runoff into the sewer system, causing increased flows and unnecessary and costly treatment of clean water, which overloads the system.

Water commissioners told selectmen this week they plan to use a combination of public education, financial programs and follow-up to persuade homeowners to stop the wasteful connections. They said money from the sewer or sewer rate accounts will be used to help homeowners pay for the cost to comply.

“This is just our attempt to give us more teeth in going after these illegal connections,” said Water Commissioner Paul H. Burnett. “We’re going to do public education and at some point we will have a number of violations. We’re going to work with the taxpayers to get this corrected.”

Town Manager Daniel J. Morgado said the town sends an average of 3.73 million gallons of water each day to the Westboro Wastewater Treatment Plant. On some days when the flows are high as much as 10 million gallons goes to the plant.

The town pays treatment cost based on the percentage of flow compared with that of Westboro and Hopkinton, which send a small share. Shrewsbury paid nearly 61 percent of the plant’s treatment last fiscal year. Mr. Morgado said each 1 percent is worth $36,000 in treatment cost.

He said that a few years ago, the town’s percentage of flow was 57 percent. Reducing the flow back to 57 percent would save the town more than $100,000 a year, plus the cost to move the water to the plant.

“The issue, however, is also a capacity issue of moving and treating that much water at one time,” he said.

“The whole purpose of this is to try to create awareness,” Mr. Morgado said. “If you’re having issues with water on your property, we need to figure out what to do about it. But, we can’t have the water going into the sewer system.

“We hope folks will self-identify with no penalty and we’re focus on no-cost or low-cost ways to address it.”

Mr. Morgado said that in addition to paying to make physical improvements to the system, the town set aside $1 million in the last two years to deal with the problem of water infiltration, ground water getting into aging lines. This week the town authorized Phase III of work to inspect sewer lines for infiltration, at a cost of $175,000. Similar investigations were done in 2011 and 2012.

Repairs identified in the three phases will get under way this summer. The town is also about to issue an estimated $4.5 million contract for sewer interceptor repairs.

Contact Elaine Thompson at ethompson@telegram.com. Follow her on Twitter at EThompsonTG